this again

ah, the getting back of student evaluations. for me, a time always marked by 24 hours of wildly careening between defensiveness, self congratulation, and considering all the many ways in which student evaluations in general are a terrible practice.* this time, aside from the usual scattered students who complained about the workload because they have other classes to worry about (!), the ones that seem confused about the instructions filling out the form, the ones who think i'm impersonal and unreasonable, and the ones who want me to be their personal life coach for the rest of their life, i had two separate comments saying i was too harsh on one particular student that term, and for reasons too detailed to rehearse here, i am quite certain the comments were not written by that student. let's call that student chris, shall we?

early in the term chris announced that although hitler (as in adolf) had done a lot wrong, he (hitler) had actually had some pretty good ideas. i am near-apoplectic thinking about this even now. has chris ever taken a history class? is chris a sociopath? has chris had any interactions with humans before this moment? does chris think such comments are funny to say to near-strangers? i do not know any of these things, but at the time i thought that it would not do chris or anyone else in the class any favors to ignore such comments, even at the expense of my being "liked." so i told chris that while i personally didn't care what chris secretly thinks, chris should know that in the future, when chris says stuff like that, no one will take chris seriously and that chris might be unwittingly portraying chrisself as at best uneducated and asocial and at worst violently racist. so i guess if reminding students that the nazi regime was real and evil and that it is, to say the least, problematic to suggest otherwise in public while supposedly pursuing humanist values, is overly harsh, then i stand behind it. and i challenge you to argue that the other students telling me i was too harsh is appropriate, helpful, or a measure of my pedagogy.

more broadly, i honestly cannot understand what students' relationship to college is, these days and in general. with many many exceptions, i notice some patterns emerging that may be nothing more than the result of me getting older and noticing differently, or may be a gauge of Kids These Days. such patterns include: being surprised at consequences of actions; thinking everything should be entertaining and fun, even things you have to do; being suspicious about getting brainwashed into, say, thinking it's a good idea to protect the environment, even as they swallow the hook, line and sinker of some other affirming ideology and even as they gladly fork over $40k for tuition; extreme self-centeredness that manifests in utter and complete lack of empathy for others (see chris story above, although i guess his classmates anonymously sticking up for their poor little neo-nazi friend is a nice counterpoint) and in thinking the rules are fine for everyone else, but don't apply to me. these are the things i wring my hands about when student evaluations come around. thus my hands, they are wrung.

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*to wit: given their position and the timing, students at the end of a term can hardly be said to be the best judges of what/how they've learned, and anyway, they pretty much judge that according to what grade they're getting; the only score administrators care about is the personality-contest "rate quality of the instructor" one, and it's hard to think of that as a measure of effective pedagogy; everyone disavows the process, but in the course of that disavowal, if they get good scores they seem condescending and if they get bad scores they seem resentful; except in extreme outlying cases, these scores really don't bear on tenure and promotion, but nevertheless they can be really demoralizing or buoying for at least 48 hours; everyone talks about how they don't matter but feels deep inside like they do; and lastly, i, and i don't think i'm alone in this, have never, ever ever received feedback--positive or negative--that was useful. i mean, what am i supposed to do with "more explanation"?? i can only ever hope for opposite extremes in evaluations to know i'm doing something right.